On-path SmartNIC.
As shown in Figure REF (b), the on-path SmartNIC exposes the NIC cores to the systems with low-level programmable interfaces,
allowing them to directly manipulate the raw packets.
As its name implies, the offloaded code is on the critical path of the network processing pipeline. Example NICs include Marvell LiquidIO [1]} and Netronome Agilio [2]}.
The benefit is that the offloaded code is closer to the network packets.
Therefore, inline requests that only interact with the NIC,
such as writing to on-board memory (➁), are extremely efficient [3]}, [4]}.
